I've been seeing the term reparenting a lot lately - slightly suspiciously, because I'd been thinking about it and then it started showing up in my social media feeds. Not the first time I've felt like these apps are reading my mind.
If you haven't come across it, reparenting is the idea that, as an adult, you can look at how you were raised and decide what you want to carry forward and what you want to do differently. With yourself. And, if you have kids, with them.
Reparenting and parenting end up happening in the same moment, which is part of why parenting can feel so difficult sometimes. You're catching yourself about to say the thing your mother said, and in the same breath you're deciding whether to say it. Raising a kid puts you in front of an earlier version of yourself, in real time, while she's looking up at you waiting for an answer.
Pot-Roast Parenting
It reminds me of the pot roast story I first heard in university. It was a class on behavioural psychology, and the professor was telling it to make a point about human behaviour - how we mimic, how we end up doing things other people do without questioning it. It applies to parenting as well.
You may have heard the story before. A daughter is cooking a pot roast and cuts off both ends before putting it in the pan. Her husband asks her why. She says, "That's how my mom does it." Curious now, she calls her mother and asks. Same answer - "That's how Grandma did it." So she finally calls Grandma. Grandma laughs and says, "Oh, my pan was too small."
Three generations of trimming the roast, and only the first person doing it knew why. Grandma had a real reason at the time, but her daughter and granddaughter just inherited the practice without ever asking what it was for. The reason had stopped applying long before either of them got to the cutting board, and the trimming just kept going.
That's what reparenting actually looks like in practice. Mostly it shows up as a small daily question. Why am I about to say no to this? Why is this particular behavior making me so upset? Why is my reflex this and not something else? Some of those answers will trace back to a real reason, a pan that used to be too small for a meal we loved. Others won't - just patterns that took hold without anyone deciding they should.
The fear underneath
When I talk to people about the idea of reparenting, I think some of the hesitation has to do with what they think the examining will require of them next, rather than with the examining itself.
The worry is that looking equals committing to changing. That if you really sit with why you do something, you'll have to stop doing it. That if you notice a piece of your life isn't actually yours, you're now on the hook to overhaul everything.
So the easier move is not to look. Keep cutting the ends off the roast. Keep saying the thing your mother said. Don't ask the question.
Examining and changing are two separate decisions. The first one doesn't commit you to the second. You can look at why you do something and decide, with full knowledge, to keep doing it exactly the way you've always done it, and the only thing that actually changes is that you're now doing it on purpose instead of by default.
I'll give you a small example from my own life. I do a 7-step skincare routine, the kind of multi-step regimen that's pretty common where I come from. My six-year-old daughter has noticed. She asked me when she gets to use the toner and the serums and the creams. I told her when her skin starts changing and we think it needs more support.
I have not fully resolved my own relationship to that routine. I know enough about where current beauty standards came from to ask myself the question, and I haven't answered it yet. I'd still rather be the one describing the standard to her, in language she can hold onto, before someone else does.
That's also reparenting - sitting inside a practice I haven't fully figured out, while raising someone who's watching me do it. I'm not pretending I've stepped outside the system, or that I don't want some of what the system is selling. I'm trying to be honest, with myself and eventually with her, about what's mine and what was handed to me.
The pot roast story tends to get used as a "question everything" lesson. I don't take it quite that hard. Sometimes the answer after the examination is yes, I still want to do this, and now I know why. Other times the season for changing it isn't right, and that's a legitimate answer too. And sometimes the practice gets passed forward because it earned its place this time around, not because no one stopped to ask.
The only door reparenting closes behind you is the option of pretending you didn't look. Everything else stays open.
A Thought To Carry Forward:
“The fear of examining can be related to the fear of being committed to changing. Those are 2 separate decisions.”